Joerg

Depending on who you ask: A form of mystical enlightenment allowing the illuminate to transcend simple dualisms. An insidious form of acceptance of Chaos. A cheat skill allowing a character to avoid persecution by spirits of reprisal. A mental affliction spread by Riddlers and their nonsensical koans. See RQ2 Cults of Terror for RuneQuest game mechanics.

The bound spirit's lifetime certainly will be extended beyond its natural life-span. Otherwise Chalana Arroyans with Butterfly allies will be constantly re-summoning their allied spirits, and where to get butterflies in the middle of winter? (Does Genertela have an equivalent of the Monarch butterfly migration, and where would they spend their winters?)

Why in the Second Age? When I look at the tales of Rastalulf and Brolarulf, these are tales about thanes, from the late middle of the Dawn Age. Much of the later Second Age history of the Orlanthi is about the EWF, little mentioned and much forgotten. Prior to that was the Kingdom of Orlanthland, at first under Arkat's Command but in control of the tribute from Dara Happa, then they lost control over Dara Happa, and a century later the Tax Slaughter ended the tributes to the trolls about the time the first of those weird dragonfriends showed up. Next came the regime of the priests, without kings but instead Great Living Heroes, a concept lost along with the dragon-speaking, but practiced by traditionalist Orlanthi outside of the EWF as well as inside the EWF (Renvald).

In terms of vinyards I am picturing the slopes around Castle Stahleck, which has mainly crushed rock.

There are tribal Yelmalians in Sartar, and there is Sun Dome County. Do all Beast Rider followers of the Storm Bull follow a storm khan full time, or are there some who instead aid a khan or a clan chief inside their tribe? Or is it up to a Storm Khan to pledge allegiance to a tribal leader? Or does this mean that there are hardly any Storm Bull worshipers present in your average beast rider clan, that all of those who heard the Calling of the Bull are off to the closest (or most sacred) chaos-battling ground, leaving their clan without any cultic expertise in fighing Chaos? How permanent is "gang membership"? (Always assuming the charismatic Storm Khan stays alive. If he dies, I suppose all oaths are fulfilled, or else the followers whose oaths aren't are about to go on a suicidal avenging mission.) Can a more charismatic Storm Khan win over members of a different gang? Does tribal origin play any role in choosing a Storm Khan?

Having just re-visited Biturian's expedition to the Block, at that time there were at least three Sable-riding Storm Bull followers at the Block. Whether they still had tribal ties is a different question. How much are the Storm Bull initiates among the Beast Riders clan (and tribe) warriors, and how much are they first and foremost members of Storm Bull warbands? Do Waha Khans have retinues of sworn warriors similar to the Orlanthi clan chiefs and kings? When it comes to the relationship with the Storm Bull, I wonder how much resentment there is on the side of the Lunars against the Bull warriors. The entire Rinliddi and then Dara Happan rebellion was against the Carmanian Bull Shahs.

Cows disappear from the windows of a starting plane at about 1000 meters, but then they aren't 2m in diameter, only in one dimension. Three nanometers? I knew trolls were short-sighted, but that bad?

Plenty of ideas for a number of places. The description of the city reminded my of the port of Westel in Maslo (although that seems to inherit from Nan Madol as much as the East Island site of Nan Matol), and parts of the description may fit right into the low-lying parts of Melib, too.

Was the Crimson Bat already crimson at that time, or did it receive that coloration after Arkat had skinned it? I seem to recall it being named for a slightly different color earlier. Was it already chaotic, or was it a regular Rinliddi Death and Darkness demon? If that fight happened near Dorastor, the skin may well have been turned into magical drums or similar weapons of mass destruction.

While I haven't directly worked in the glass industry, I have worked for the glass industry as a chemist in product control for ultra-pure raw materials. A translucent city wall made of glass is probably beyond our modern technology. Glass with the thickness of a brick may let through light, but won't let through any contours - the church of my youth had such glass bricks, and as a special gimmick blobs of glass as leftovers from that casting process as wall ornamentation creating bigger than fist sized pixels in the wall. Glass with the thickness of 20 or more bricks, even if it could be cast as a monolithic piece, would severely dampen the light going through. (Unlike glass fibre, I don't see how it can be manufactured to allow optimum light transmission.) If you are using glass bricks, you'd need to fuse them perfectly to avoid severe inclusions or intermittent surfaces or density fluctuations creating an opalescent or mother-of-pearl effect at the boundaries. Heat and sudden quenching (alternate sendings of fire and water elementals) will remove nice flakes that you can use for all kinds of neolithic tools, and may crack the big monolith early on. Working through that may take an earth elemental's strength. Both glass and concrete can be whittled down with focussed sand or slag storms. And extreme cold combined with brute force is another bane to glass, so yay to Darkness forces. Lead mostali may be able to do some very nice lead crystal glass, or high quality labware for the quicksilvers, Having the caste of the darkness metal in charge of transparency sounds like a losing strategy to me, though. Even if we allow Imperial Roman levels of glass blowing in some parts of the Bronze Age setting of Glorantha, window panes that allow an un-distorted view of the outside are in all likelihood unknow in Glorantha. But we get six foot thick window panes? That surpasses "It's magic", and those walls might just as well be made of translucent ice in the middle of summer. And we all know how a wall of ice would look after eight seasons of Game of Thrones, don't we?

Where does it say that the spirits of reprisal attack a priest who fails to maintain their POW at 18? The rules you are citing below are for a person leaving their cult, not for failing to maintain the prerequisites. There is only one way a god would accept more POW than those above 18 from a priest or god talker, and that is through Divine Intervention. A priest might drop willingly below that level through an enchantment, or through sacrificing POW to a different cult, and that may incur a severe displeasure and a sending of spirits of reprisal. An involuntary loss of POW e.g. due to Soul Waste, Tapping or equivalent malign magical interaction makes the character unable to use any of the priestly or god talker advantages (including the sweet deal on POW gain rolls). That's for apostates. A priest or god talker falls back to being an initiate. Perhaps not in the best standing, but still able to worship the deity and to regain rune points like an initiate. That should take care of most of your problems you state here: If you become an apostate, you keep those spells and rune points (they are part of your magical being), but there is no way that your original cult will allow you to sacrifice for them and to refresh them. However, a temple say in Fonrit or the East Isles may have little problems with infractions against rules that the temple has never heard about, and may accept the character into the local form of whichever Theyalan deity the character was severed from, and that may re-kindle the rune points. Spellteaching requires rune level status for some reason - probably because the cult (spell) spirits won't listen to any parvenu initiate's Command to release their Secret. You cannot be a Lhankor Mhy apprentice in a library with that time requirement, though - think the amount of time a graduate student is contractually obliged to put in, and how many hours they put in in reality. (In case of doubt, read the "piled higher and deeper" or PHD webcomic.) LM sorcerers may very well make a living as alchemists, perfumers, jewellers and similar knowledge-heavy artisanship, and possibly make enough money to either purchase books for their own use (allowing the temple to make copies thereof, though, possibly financing that as their tithes). If they were cult members before, they are losing all the health service, dental plan etc. equivalents. Like getting ransomed on credit (once) rather than having to go prepaid. If your Sword Lord is on spell-teaching duty for the cult initiates free points of spell-teaching, no cutting off limbs for a week, either. As someone who has never played RQ2 or RQ Classic, I am quite confused why those arbitrary numbers from RQ2 are back in RQG. RQ3 had way more reasonable requirements and needed no arbitrary "god talkers get +20% on their POW Gain rolls" exception from perfectly good rules. It feels a bit like playing Nethack and suddenly being tossed into a "Rogue" level where nothing works as it should. So, while I gave you an interpretation of how the POW 18+ rule is written in the rules as far as I can make it out, don't look at this as a defense of that IMO arbitrary design decision. While I agree with many criticisms that have been mentioned at the interaction of RQ3 and Glorantha, RQ2 wasn't any better at it. Just because your moth-ridden and dog-chewed ancient slippers have sentimental value doesn't mean that they are the best footwear.

In my Glorantha Darksense doesn't use air or water as its medium, but someone using Darksense cannot avoid to make sound in addition to the Darksense pings. Theoretically, trolls could have musical instruments that are primarily attuned to Darkness as medium. In case of drums, that doesn't change much in the sound profile, but harmonies and tuning may suffer. Think of throat-singing without the basic sound.

You can only bring out what was brought in. If you want to take a golden armor on a Hill of Gold heroquest (or perhaps the magical shield of reflection) in the role of Orlanth, you'd better hope that the poor guy who is entering this quest in the Yelmalio role has brought one. If you are doing a training quest, then yes, your friend who has taken on the ritual role of Yelmalio will have to bring the armor that you may want to bring back as highly improved. A typical benefit would be to gain a feat (magic, a gift of skill, divine bonus to stats) adequate to the experience. You may end up with a new tattoo revealing things about you that you did not know before. Harmast somehow acquired a Kodigvari tribal tattoo after his escape from Exile Stead. Sometimes a quest finds you without you having been prepared or being able to gain a substantial new bonus. Biturian's encounter with the Zorak Zoran cult benefitted Rurik, but not Biturian or his party. (Other than survival.) On the other hand, that very encounter could have turned the rather mundane gilt armor Biturian had received in the Three Strkes of Anger rite earlier on into a way more magical item by Rurik's quest.like entry, hence Rurik's disappointment at learning that Birurian had already sold it. When Arkat received the unhealable wound, it remained with him at least until his confrontation with Nysalor. But then he had recognized his attacker, and remembered well how he had dealt out that strike. Sometimes you perish on the Other Side, and when the other questers return, you wake up and remember how you died. Sometimes you lose a hand, and no magic will bring it back. At other times, you lose a hand, and when you return your hand has changed. If you are the narrator of the quest, quite a lot of that is up to you. As a player on a quest, there is little one can call up as binding precedent. I have gone on a Hill of Gold heroquest as Zorak Zoran, and the Fire rune ended up with the Orlanth quester...

none - those are the fiction works that Andre published for the Chaos Society.

HW / HQ1 stat blocks are lists of abilities that the character uses. Quite a lot of the major NPC abilities are followers, i.e. Loyalty "follower(s)" X%, and then a stat block for the follower. HQ2 / HQG I think that is a mis-understanding. 1W in a rune is what allows you to initiate into the cult. What's that in RQG? 50%+.

If you are looking for runic influences, I'd cite Darkness, Celestial (Light and/or Moon), and Sea. For their empire, they may have used something different than their own language - possibly a pidgin of Doraddic, Vadeli, Thinobutan and Antigod Eastern in addition to original Artmali Lunar.

I wonder - would we be able to discern a syllabary (like Japanese or Mayan scripts) from an alphabetic script like Ogham or Futhark at first glance? (And Futhark does mix logographic use of the runes with the general alphabetic use, at least where it intrudes into some Anglo-Saxon riddle poetry.) Since Western script was developed in the Kingdom of Logic, might it contain operators as shorthand for conjunctions, pronouns and similar syntactic or grammatical functions?

A nice collection. Three covers of Gloranthan novels or story collections published by @AndreJarosch via Chaos Society (two Penelope Love books - "The Widow's Tale" and "Eurhol's Vale", one Jim Chapin book) are missing, though. The Kraken convention chap-book covers don't have much in the way of images. One minor niggle: the first RuneQuest convention at Castle Stahleck in Bacharach (Rheingoldqueste) was in 1996. The first Tentacles convention followed in the next year, in the same location. There are two Gloranthan scenarios in the HeroQuest Adventure Book. My Gloranthan one is meant to be expanded for English publication, but I have been waiting for the Nochet book to be able to set it in the canonical setting. A good part of that scenario had been written in English before I started to prepare it for the German publication, and without strong input from Robin Mitra (editor in chief and initiator of the German HeroQuest books) it would not have been finished for inclusion in that book. It is about a pilgrimage for the female descendants of an ancient Asrelia priestess in Sartar whose dying wish was for her body to be interred in her birth-family's crypt in (or outside of) Nochet. The other Gloranthan scenario is set in Fonrit and deals with the miraculous birth of a divine child in that land. The rest of the scenarios explore the HQ system in a variety of settings - historical ones (like a journey through northern Europe in 1066), modern ones in various genres.

Sourcebook p.11 has a shorter version (identical to that of Troll Pak Uz Lore, p.28 in the RQ2 edition) of what TSR offers on p.7f The detail about the Ralian dragonewts comes from King of Sartar (p.89 in the hardcover edition/pdf), and possibly elsewhere. What TSR did was to add another secret layer to that story in the "For the Gamemaster's Eyes Only" section on p.39. The title of that section already tells you that that content is spoilers. Read at your own peril.

I'm not sure what you mean by spambot. If you are receiving spam from Tapatalk please flag it. Tapatalk have robust systems for dealing with it and have been very helpful with the archive. The platform itself inundates you with "product news" etc., or at least did when I last connected to it.

A temple can get a regular attendance by throwing feasts, which means a sufficiently rich sponsor can attract enough of a crowd for regular attendance if they can do so by exchanging some magic for food and booze. Having a good fair-like atmosphere around your festivals will attract more. If you have a sufficient number of tenants, those will provide a good portion of the attending crowd for the festivals - it is when they can partake of the portion they provide to the shrine. Having a suitable relic, occupying an accessible yet suitably magical place, and impressive sacral architecture can take you onward. If your players establish themselves in a role similar to Duke Raus, they should be able to maintain a couple of shrines or a small temple on their own. That does alter the pattern of adventuring, though, and will put some focus on domestic trouble-shooting. Effectively King of Dragon Pass/Six Ages style table-top role-playing. Or, once you have sufficient means to just throw resources at it, you create a follower who runs that temple for you and generates the occasional plot hole hook.

The northern EWF saw some extra dragonfire with the scorch, a systematic weeding done by a formation of dragons. But then Aldachur may have been a stronghold of the Golden Spearman cult already back in the EWF era, and may have seen some serious defense of the occupying forces against the dragons, backed by magic. Aldachur and Glasswall are in the same area, so it is likely that the same dragon (or team of dragons) vitrified both places. Glass was used as smooth artificial gem initially, with transparence or being shaped into bulbs or drinking vessels coming some time later. "Curiously organic buildings" does exclude the other folk potentially bizarre enough to build a city with glass walls. Dragonewt building material has been described as an adobe, and putting up such structures may be what they take on newtling bachelors for. I think of that as some form of cocooning rather than actual urban planning, possibly with some patterning resembling the curlicues of advanced dragonewt scale. If they are built at all, and not just conjured from draconic dreams. The other known item of dragonewt architecture are the dragonewt plinths which mark their magical roads. These appear to have been carved, but may well have been conjured from dreams as well.

Dragonfire melted the stone of the city there into a glass-like slag. The walls aren't transparent, but like glazed very deeply.

I wouldn't know how to provide this on an interactive map, to be honest. You'll probably want to have post-canonical material referenced, too, like the Mongoose products, or the HW/HQ1 era material dealing with the west in a very different language (churches, knights...) now deprecated. My old Index to Glorantha publications had long lists of items referring to a region. Much of the info referenced there was expanded in the Guide, which lacks such internal cross-references. The Glorantha Wikia has purged any post-canonical info, deleting quite a bit of the more inclusive early work while attempting valiantly yet futilely to use the categories provided by that platform as a hierarchical access to the data. One of the most inclusive projects, the Lokarnos.com website, was lost to the world as it was discontinued in the face around the time of a fan policy document that alienated quite a few fan publishing websites without actually aiming to do so. Plenty of private sites were lost, too. Others just weren't continued as providers folded or private domains were left fallow. The posts on google plus were salvaged, but the Tapatalk platform hosting these is at best an archive and at worst a spambot. Facebook is about as ephemeral. The current Chaosium has done its best to make at least the old official material accessible to everybody. The early two decades of online discussion on public mailing lists or yahoogroups are available under glorantha.steff.in. Material outside of Dragon Pass and Prax is rare for canonical sources other than the Guide and obscure references to deities and cults. Dagori Inkarth has seen some love in Troll Pak. Balazar and the Elder Wilds have one publication: Griffin Mountain Dorastor has one sourcebook (RQ3: Dorastor, Land of Doom) and the narrative in Cults of Terror. Maniria has Blood over Gold, under the older paradigms for the West. The oceans have Men of the Sea, again with older paradigms.

There is the element of the Adjustment Wars that finished only after the Dragonkill. While Heortlander certainly would have seen an upswing during the successful years of the Adjustment Wars, once the backlash came against the Hendriki invaders their dialect would quite likely have become a dialect non grata. Thus, for identity politics, I suppose that a majority of Esrolians would have avoided the stronger Storm Speech influence on Theyalan and would instead have intentionally brought more Earth Speech into their dialect. This may have reached into different ways of simplification of the language at backstreet level while at the same time introducing more complicated influence in the language of the upper crust. And while some houses may have retained more adjusted ways, the next change was brought to Esrolian with the annexation of (previously adjusted) Porthomeka by Caladralanders and the spread of the Warm Earth influences just before Belintar took over. Belintar had his own reasons to encourage identity politics. Esrolian may have been on the upsurge around 1470 when the Orendanae were strong in the region. For Sartar, the "Always Another Way" mantra offered a good climate to bring in his changes, even if he overcame the Orendanae champion and decided the contest with the FHQ for himself. But then, if Sartar promoted any language or dialect, that would have been Tradetalk.